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Posts tagged ‘core knowing’

Aug 4

Summer Mysticism: Returning to the World After Retreat

Post-retreat there is a tendency to go home and blow it. Blow all the money! As one friend says, “It’s easy to piss away all the energy built up in retreat, overworking, over committing, letting it leach away.” It is extremely unwise to squander the work done in training periods because this is dangerous to body and being. In retreat we fill our circuits and forge new tendrils, then these need to ‘set’. They need to cohere. If, after a training period, the we forget about or actively destroy the energy by not caring for our health, eating badly, getting into tumultuous relationships in work or life, then we not only undermine health and mental stability. We also damage spiritual capacity. We damage spiritual potential. We burn our circuits. You can do this a few times, but after a while the body being wears out. It’s like, How many times can your break your ankle in the same spot before it hardens?

I have lifted the requirement of daily practice from those in Intensive Training, but I still recommend daily practice—daily ‘remembrance’, as the Sufis call it. Remembrance of our Truth.  I don’t want to police it, not because I’m lazy; I just think it isn’t serving the people who train with me. It puts the struggle for one’s Path outside the self, keeping the self from ‘growing up’, spiritually-speaking. Each of us has to recognize our resistance, our choices. We need to reflect on them and weigh them. No one can put you on your own center. If you want it—inner peace, authenticity, perception, solidity—you have to strive for it. Struggle for it. A child’s little legs must work. It’s best if I step aside there. Go head—have your own intimate self-dialogue about that.

Our questions: What is important to me? Where does real happiness come from? When do I feel most whole? If spiritual path is where we live in Truth, then a regular return to the Doorway is one of the most crucial stages of growth. Retreat training and personal practice open that Doorway. Over the years, I’ve personally come to rely on a brief but focused daily practice, thus my recommendation. I hope for us all that the heart will cry for it and land us in a quiet room, with closed eyes, breathing, moving, feeling the world beyond thought. I hope the practice calls us to it. Wouldn’t that be wonderful…But if not, well, what are you going to do about it?

Jul 7

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Moths

I peer into the angel votive glass as I’m about to blow out the candle and see a graveyard. Ten or fifteen moths are embedded in soft wax while others fragment in the pyre. So this is the Angel of Fire. She has appeared so innocent all these weeks, the flame flickering in her belly. Now moths cast into her. They cannot resist. What an absurdity—to be created to adore something so lethal! Their bodies make the candle spit feverishly and when it hardens, their dark carcasses form oblique dark accents in the pale wax. I resonate with sacrificial ground, the litter of moths, but also with the fire which consumes in steady relaxation.

The cabin’s thin wooden walls and open windows are connected to what is beyond—I am half outside all the time. My psyche is finally beginning to trust this but neither quickly nor easily. My cramped shape of self, molded by the confines and habits of my NYC apartment, have had me living cut and bound, my body’s long silvery threads severed, coiled, knotted. Limbs, skin, and tight skull now learn to unkink, expand, and rest in the vast space beyond the rim. I am often in a feverish body, my core threatening to burn through the skin and bones, to sear the bed and ignite the sheets. I am recovering. I am recovering from a long serious illness—my life caught in amber, my lifer so patterned it was immovable, breathless, still. A fever burns off an illness.

In the space and air and time, the amber cracks. It takes huge energy to live through this. I feel guilt for my lassitude, guilt for my pleasure; I fear my pointlessness. And I am fortunate to be some kind of moth.

Jun 26

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Talking is Wind

Many birds today. And the ravens!

Talking. It’s wind. Air moves in shapes and temperatures. I am mostly involved in expressing meaning and oblivious to the shaping by my tongue teeth, lips, and throat of little gusts of air into rounded, clipped, or coiled forms. Talking all comes down to breath. Gale, zephyr, breeze, wail. As I talked with a friend, I had a perception of my words as being buffoon-like, the wheeze of antique bicycle horn, or a guttering candle end. Part of me was present in my words while another part witnessed my conversation in abstraction, as sounds devoid of discernible content, and right there, in middle of throat motions and noises, I felt relaxation. Has the pressure to express meaning co-opted my breath?

Thought, perception, and reflection are beautiful. Talking is beautiful. Like everything, it is most beautiful when it is relaxed, not driven, compressed, or glued together in Frankenstein shapes. I love when a true perception forms itself in within me, rolls along my tongue, catches a flow of exhale, and, if it needs to, eddies gently out. I also love when my thoughts aren’t driven to emerge but instead, roam free and breathless through the my neurotransmitter corridors, becoming this and that, popping up, dying away, cobbling into new contraptions.

Could breath come and go, the throat open, sounds come out, and not mean anything? Is meaning so essential? Must every bodily squirt come to something?

Jun 20

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Waking

This morning, the Bower is all comfort. I feel inertial.

As I woke, I lay in bed, cool, smoke-tinged air, round as a cotton ball, pushed in the window. I savored being under the covers. The sheets softness matched the silky air. The trees seemed to clean the air that has been carrying smoke from the uncontained Carson Forrest, AZ fires west as far as Ohio. I curled under the covers and waited for the impulse of rising to fill my legs and spine and arms. The time of waiting, which isn’t really waiting but my body’s gathering together into a gesture or act of rising, was delicious.

I wasn’t aware of going toward rising. I was aware of floating away from sleep, from the night. My ears and eyes drifted over their domains, sipping sounds, sipping snippets of view, bird shadow, gilded pine needles. My nose weighed the ratio of smoke to pine scent. A little inner engine assessed and organized these fragments, feeding them to my flesh until I curled into a ball or spilled onto my belly to modulate my core temperature or to nudge my skin to lap the sheet, an awareness coming after-the-fact, ‘Ahhhhhh, that feels good.” The accumulation of these bits, like the building of sensorial friction, revved my little engine into action, and I sat up. No effort. No thought tractor-ed down my nerve branches, pushing sluggish muscles through a brain fog.

There I sat, empty, not standing or lying down or changing in any way. Time ticked by. My fine-pointed awareness faded as the wave of morning routine washed in—make the bed, get the tea going. The day of thoughts, plans, actions began.

And then I arrived with my tea tray in the Bower. It is all comfort. I feel inertial.

Nov 24

Three Dimensions from Two

“Van Eyck (early 15th century) understood that realism [in painting] doesn’t require verisimilitude but only just enough visual cues to exploit the mind’s credulity.” ~ Peter Schjedahl, New Yorker mag 11/10   Perhaps realism, in a two-dimensional surface, is better served by visual cuing than for instance by the plethora of detail in a photograph, since cuing ‘suggests’. A cue makes room for consciousness to add associated non-visual information making the flat surface spring into three dimensionality. I look a Van Eyck’s painting and feel the temperature of the scene, and almost smell what it depicts. My being wants the total sensorial array and, if given a cue, will rescue bits of experience from memory, cobble these together, and so I may enter my own pastiche.

I often wonder, then, what a viewer adds to seeing three dimensional movement, and this brings me to the doorstep of Witness Dances — being watched and watching. I witness someone move and much of my effort goes to seeing what she is  doing. But in recent times this has felt entirely forced, not so much a practice of visual focus and undivided attention but rather a blinder to ‘what is’. In my new phase I turn toward finding my breath as I watch others and let my attennae go to work gathering impressions. My mind spreads open, clears, the way a rumpled patch of water settles, and finally I see what I am looking at. But how can I know if it is reality? It is at the very least my reality. My view. I realize, for me, being seen in Witness Dancing is no issue. I am entirely comfortable in the role. All my growth has been during the aspect of witnessing. I had no idea when I began this practice, that this aspect would require such a long unfolding and challenge so much of what I understand in myself.

New Yorker Article

Apr 16

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Is Not Is-ness

During the Asheville, NC Dancemeditation Weekend:

I had strong dreams which I can’t remember — part of their charm, but it was a relief to sleep deeply, to dream fully, to be in a world not nailed down. A world of odd intuition, paradox, pockets of clarity and pockets of dark fragments that weren’t frantic but simply unordered. Chaos. The word ‘chaos’ implies pandemonium but it can be quiet, floating, peculiar. Chaos may contain both potential and unraveling without knowing which is which. Chaos is the Is Not for a mind that favors categorization and definition; for a bodymind that lives in a cognitive netherworld, this Is Not is a balm, a boon, a peace, an Is Not Is-ness.

Not exactly Wujud, but clasping its edge. Wajad.

When I taste Is Not Is-ness — the pure place that has no white light, no angels — insanity departs, fear departs, bone-deep exhaustion departs. I drink happiness.
Without it, my life is slow death.

Nov 20

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Breaths as Jewels

During the recent NYC Intensive, I wrote:
I entered the Black Velvet Inner-ness where breaths float as jewels.
Breath is the activator and lens of subtlety. In the realm of subtlety we can dissolve into that which is most infinite and most intimate. For Sufis, the court of love is found inside the subtlety inside the breath. Read more

Sep 12

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The Ferocity of Witnessing

It can be hard to realize, until you’ve done it, that you’ve just spent a time of being-ness. A time that is empty of activity but full of perception and of  “the ferocity of witnessing”, as a wonderful poet just said ( I need to find his name — from NJ, a factory worker and poet, if anyone knows who I mean).

Weighty guilt keeps us busy. Dizzy manic action, fueled by fear of fear, anger at anger, or grief over sorrow sweeps away the stops in life.
Three beloved stops: Stop doing. Stop making something of the not-doing. Stop justifying.
In my case, guilt hung heavy, filling moments of void no longer full of justification.

But then, this summer, guilt moved for me. It moved. It wore out.

I kept doing nothing, watching, perceiving. I wondered if I  was depressed. I wondered if I was mistaken. I wondered if I was ill. But when I stopped wondering, I felt the thrill of rightness. The world was full. And I could keep going. ‘Nothing’ tied me to the chair, kept me awake, shut the computer, turned the phone volume off.

I witnessed, and it was ferocious.

Mar 18

Poem from Urvashi

Here is a beautiful poem from Dancemeditator, poet, and neuroscientist, Urvashi Dunyati-Long. It caught my heart as I’d just been thinking, right before she emailed it to me, about trying not to control, and of release, of receiving.

urvashiportrait.jpg

Along About Reality
(for everyone – and you know who you are!)

So, I’m listening to a 40 year old sonic reality
–the Beatles to be exact. So many people and things
have left their trace
between my neurons,
deep in the synaptic pathways that have become

who I am. 40 years ago I sat on a swing
in Germany
singing Help, Ticket to Ride,
All You Need is Love. My parents and brother
were alive. All was not well with the world.
The Vietnam war bled away the lives of a generation
but we had hope, we wanted to

give peace a chance. We wanted to believe
Love was all we needed. Well,
we need food too, don’t we, and water,
fresh air, people we love, a world to stand on
that we don’t shake, rattle and roll
with our hate. Today I study neuroscience,
try to understand how reality is created in us
by DNA, culture, all the things pressing into
the wet clay of our minds
that presses back, shapes as much as it is shaped. Yeah,

Life is the miracle we have been waiting for,
this messy tangling up
of everything into

the only thing that matters
within which we could find
everything we think it is we want, if only we could just

stand back
and let it happen.

©2008 Teresa Dunyati-Long

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